Kidney disease

Little boy having an ultra sound on kidney

Kidney disease (also called renal disease) is a general term for when the kidneys don’t work properly, causing waste to build up in the body.

The kidneys filter or clean blood to remove waste and create urine. When not working properly, waste and fluid build up in the body.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) refers to a permanent reduction in kidney function. Left untreated, this may progress to kidney failure and death.

Kidney failure affects 12 million people worldwide but despite being a major chronic disease, treatment hasn’t changed in more than 70 years. Patients undergo dialysis where a device substitutes for normal function, or a kidney transplant.

About 50 per cent of kidney disease in children is inherited and, in many cases, the disease-causing gene mutation is unknown, making diagnosis and treatment difficult.

Kidney disease can limit growth in children, cause fatigue, heart disease and reduce lifespan, quality of life and participation in activities.

Who does it affect?

Kidney disease affects one in 10 people (7 million Australians) but most don’t know they have it. Kidney failure is increasing by six per cent a year, about 1,400 are waiting for transplants and more than 11,000 are on dialysis.
In 2017, 524 Australians aged 15 to 24 needed dialysis or transplant.
One in 1,000 children are born with kidney defects and at least half who need dialysis or a transplant have a genetic cause for their disease but for most, little is known about how the disease develops and no treatment exists.
Indigenous people have higher rates of kidney disease.

Our kidney disease research

With our partners, we treat many Australian babies and children with kidney disease. Through our Kidney flagship program, we’re driving towards new and urgently needed treatments and searching for causes and pathways in paediatric kidney disease.

Our Kidney Development, Disease and Regeneration laboratory grows mini human kidneys (organoids.) This world-first breakthrough extracts stem cells, the ‘seed’ or master cell of all cells, from patients’ blood or skin samples. We turn them into kidney cells in the laboratory and grow miniature kidneys.

These mini-kidneys will revolutionise kidney disease treatment. The ability to make all the cells required to form a developing kidney may allow us to deliver cells or kidney tissue back to patients to treat their failing organs or grow replacement kidneys to transplant.

The personalised models enable us to study disease and are a better way to test drug safety and effectiveness by showing if a drug is toxic to the kidney in a dish before giving it to the patient.

We’re also investigating the effects of COVID-19 on the kidneys, studying the genes required for normal kidney development and what happens because of genetic or environmental damage during development, and researching if genomic testing (testing all a person’s genes) can improve diagnosis and management of end-stage kidney disease of unknown cause.

Impacts of our research

Doctor holding up an ultrasound of child's kidney

Impacts of our research

Our pioneering breakthrough in 2013 growing a mini kidney the size of a five-week-old embryo gained global scientific and media attention. It’s opened the door to better treatments and growing replacement kidneys. The original organoid contained two key cell types but we’ve since grown models that form all the different cell types in a kidney, mimicking normal development. The discoveries are used to model kidney disease by scientists worldwide.
We teamed up with US biotech company Organovo to 3D bioprint mini kidneys and create 200 mini kidneys in 10 minutes that fully resemble regular-sized kidneys.
We discovered a new gene linked to a kidney disorder in children and confirmed mutations in the gene are linked to nephrotic syndrome, a condition that leads to potentially life-threatening protein loss in the urine during infancy.
We’re leading the international research centre reNEW to develop new therapies using human stem cells for kidney disease and other diseases.
Our work is improving diagnosis of urinary tract infections which are common in young children, hard to diagnose and easily missed. Untreated, they can cause serious infection and permanent kidney scarring. Collecting a urine sample for diagnosis can be hard but we changed practice internationally with a method of rubbing a child’s abdomen with wet gauze to trigger urination.
We created a model of a patient’s damaged kidney filtering unit to study congenital nephrotic syndrome and investigate treatments. We also corrected a gene mutation in a patient with kidney-damaging Mainzer-Saldino Syndrome. Using her stem cells, we grew one mini-kidney with her disease and one in which the gene mutation was corrected, stopping disease development.

Our vision

We strive to give every child the opportunity for a healthy and happy future through better diagnosis, treatments and cures for kidney disease including growing replacement kidneys. Advancing understanding of causes and developing new interventions to improve children’s lives may also lead to new therapies for adult-onset kidney disease.